This does the job nicely. Adding those lines to ~/.bashrc causes the changes not to take effect at the shell prompt, unless you log into another bash shell inside the login shell. This will fix this problem. I'm not sure if this is the best place to do this. If anyone else has a better place to put such a thing, please let me know.

Apparently this info is needed in two locations for consistency: .bashrc for Konsole and /etc/profile.env for the real console. Doesn't hurt to have it in two places I suppose. I couldn't get dircolors to work right on my gentoo system.

I modified my /etc/profile.env but it always returns to a default state
(i.e. my mods gone) when I reboot.... is there some other file I need to
modify or some other way to make profile.env chnages stay?

I figured long before I found out how to also add colors to konsole, the KDE terminal program.
My alias settings (for ls) are stored in ~/.bash_profile but konsole never wanted to load this file ...
Well, you have to add the "--ls" option to konsole and it will load the files and --voila-- colors in konsole

@Dunksa Hmmm, this is strange! Better add your modifications to .bash_profile in your users home directory.
This is is a better (and cleaner) way of adding own aliases and settings.... but this is just my humble opinion

I modified my /etc/profile.env but it always returns to a default state
(i.e. my mods gone) when I reboot.... is there some other file I need to
modify or some other way to make profile.env chnages stay?

Don't edit /etc/profile.env. It is automatically generated based on the contents of /etc/env.d . Either put system-wide settings there, or put them in your /etc/profile._________________Chad

Didn't know the trick about launching konsole with -ls, however, it seems that konsole will read .bashrc all by itself. This is really unfortunate because bash (at the real console) reads .bash_profile all by itself. So as it ends up, you have to put settings in both files because konsole wants to be different. I personally don't see why Bash has a .bash_profile as well as a .bashrc, since both reside in the user's home directory. Oh well, have however you want it. By the way, if I have a setting I like, I generally make it system-wide, as other people will probably like them as well, but never actually take the time to set some decent defaults.(or even learn how...)

The reason that konsole by default doesn't read your .bash_profile is because it does not start a login shell. Traditionally there had to be separate login and non-login modes b/c automated remote logins (things like rsh) did not handle output in the login process. I am used to having a login shell source both the profile and the rc file, so I normally just add "source ~/.bashrc" at the end of my .bash_profile._________________Chad

Just noticed that .bash_profile points to a file named /etc/DIR_COLORS ...
Well, I must have accidently deleted this file or it was never installed because I don't have this file.
Which package contains this file?

Then I add the same thing to /etc/skel/.bashrc so that any newly created users get this change also by default. It won't change any existing users though. It would have to be done manually or with a script.

Of course, making those changes in /etc/profile or /etc/profile.env (not sure) would also work for a system wide use.

I know I'm a little late to this game but I thought I would throw this out for anybody searching on this topic.

All of the settings you need are found in /etc/skel. It contains a .bash_profile and .bashrc. These are not put into the /root folder by default but they are put into any new user's folder. Just copy them over to /root and you're done.

If you want these files to load from the gnome terminal panel icon, choose settings, preferences, Use --login by default.

I have a few aliases for emerge that are useful.
esearch="emerge search"
epretend="emerge --pretend"
eget="emerge --fetchonly"

I prefer to see what's going to be installed first, then get all of the files, then comile.